Amazon Granted Patent for Blockchain Data Marketplace

Amazon has been granted a patent for a data marketplace, which would open up live streaming blockchain data to subscribers in real-time, according to reports emerging today.

The application envisages a marketplace of data feeds, where individuals or companies would be able to sell streaming data via the platform, relying on blockchain-powered technology to deliver the supporting infrastructure.

The patent has now been granted to Amazon’s tech subsidiary, Amazon Technologies. The patent also included details of secondary developments on the platform, where users and developers could create “real-time dashboards, capture exceptions and generate alerts, drive recommendations, and make other real-time business or operational decisions.”

The filing specifies a number of potential use cases for the technology, including social media, finance and market information, website click-streams, and data around cryptocurrency transactions and markets.

In the latter case, Amazon said the combination of this type of data with other external data points could make this a valuable use case for the cryptocurrency sector.

“For example, a group of electronic or internet retailers who accept bitcoin transactions may have a shipping address that may correlate with the bitcoin address. The electronic retailers may combine the shipping address with the bitcoin transaction data to create correlated data and republish the combined data as a combined data stream.”

The filing also examines how the technology could be used by law enforcement agencies, including those responsible for regulating financial markets.

“For example, a law enforcement agency may be a customer and may desire to receive global bitcoin transactions, correlated by country, with ISP data to determine source IP addresses and shipping addresses that correlate to bitcoin addresses. The agency may not want additional available enhancements such as local bank data records. The streaming data marketplace may price this desired data out per GB, for example, and the agency can start running analytics on the desired data using the analysis module.”

The concept on its own is nothing new, with Henri Pikhala, CEO of competing data business Streamer saying the main benefits lie in giving users control over their data: “What is novel, is creating a space that finally gives users ultimate control over the data they create through their actions in the digital realm.”

However, with the patent covering a system that is more centralized than other similar developments, it remains to be seen whether the Amazon use case shares this goal.